


our love is a cold thing, warmer still than winter

by peterstank



Series: white winter hymnal [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Ghost is a good boy, Post-Battle, The Starks deserve happiness, i couldn’t not write something, introspective, spoilers for 8x03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-09 22:43:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18647587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterstank/pseuds/peterstank
Summary: All men die, but they had not died today.She reaches for him, clutches at his jerkin with fingers stained red, if there is a storm inside of him there is one inside her too and it rages for him, and he might just be the moon if she is a wolf, she might just howl for him, he might just be the bright thing she’d fought for in the darkness of hell.{after the battle, they are left to pick up the pieces that remain to them — post 8.03}





	our love is a cold thing, warmer still than winter

~*~

sansa

She is shaking, trembling as she takes in the state of it all; these dead bodies scattered over the stones, piles of bone and dust with clawed hands reaching toward them even in death. 

The weight of the dagger is heavy in her hand and she turns, already counting. One, two, twenty, fifty—they’re what’s left, they could be the last alive for hundreds of miles. She doesn’t know and she is almost too scared to find out, but she has faced death now and the prospect of life is much sweeter,

(life is not a song, sweetling)

so she pushes her way through the surviving mass. The women are pale like ghosts, their children cry in their arms. If she had been younger, she would have been singing hymns to them, rocking them in her arms and waiting for Father.

Father, who had died and then crawled from the granite effigy within which his bones had been laid to rest, missing a head, _are the crows still pecking at what remains of his rotted skull?_

There are others following after her; Missandei of Naath, who may have come here a stranger but together they had faced the end, they’d come out the other side. And Varys, who even in this place of decay and slaughter still smells of flowers, a perfumed dream of spring in the hall of winter. 

And Tyrion, his kiss still burns her skin, his lips had seared her through her glove; they had been ready to die together, for the first time she had known true fear—

(it is the most heroic thing they can do, face the truth; porcelain to ivory to steel; she would have fought and died but in the very least she would have taken out others with her; corpses with whom she shared blood, shared a name)

—but it had been like a song, really; the dwarf and the maiden, wielding weapons of glass, staving off the undead.

Her hands fumble with the iron bar that separates them from the outside world. She has already forgotten the sun, and wonders will the clouds part? Will she feel its warm embrace, a golden kiss to soothe her woes?

 _How stupid,_ she thinks. Tyrion helps her open the doors. They scream as they part, and absurdly she makes a note to have someone oil them later.

Bodies fall against their feet, a pile of them. There are so many she can’t even see outside, and Sansa wastes no time in grabbing one by the straps of its cloak and pulling it away. She will claw herself out of this crypt, she will use the last of her strength if she must. 

Tyrion aids her, and the children who are resilient little things, northern to the bone. They have tear tracks on rose flushed cheeks but still they rip themselves from the steel grips of their mothers and pull with her, against jerkins and britches and armour buckles.

Breathless, smeared now with blood and dirt and no doubt shit, Sansa forces her way outside.

Snow is falling. It is too gentle and soft a thing for the sight that greets her; bodies and more bodies strewn everywhere, their flesh burnt and blackened; the ruin of Winterfell, walls which had once been steadfast now crumbled and cracked; it is swathed in scarlet and everywhere there are glimpses of steel and obsidian, peeking through chests, faces, stomachs.

“Fuck,” breathes Tyrion. She glances down at him and sees that he is afraid, they have the same face now, this is a scar they will bear together.

She walks, slowly, taking in every man and woman and child that had fallen. The crumpled form of a dragon lays in the midst of it all, perhaps the strangest sight of any of them, its eye open and unseeing.

“Viserion,” Tyrion tells her, as they circle it, providing it with a wide girth for neither of them are friends with death any longer, they do not trust its cold, dark embrace as they once may have.

“He was the one she lost?”

“Yes.” Tyrion is still staring at it, and though he eyes it with a strange sort of wonder, gold and cream scales muted in the grey light of day, she sees only the wounds that gape crimson blood, claw marks and bite marks marring its fallen form.

“We should go and find them,” she says to him quietly. Them for her is Arya, who had sent her below thinking she would be safe—she had wanted to protect her and though it had been all for naught Sansa loves her for it anyway; and Jon, sweet Jon who had been right all along and she’d been the fool, just as always.

And Bran, or the Three-Eyed-Raven. Whatever he calls himself now, he is her brother. Theon too, Theon who had been a wolf all along, Theon who had saved her.

(their hearts had nearly matched in the end, their skin too; marked with puckered crosses, parts of them peeled away to reveal what lies beneath, bites from burrowed teeth)

Tyrion nods and together they, along with their retinue, move deeper into the harrowed catastrophe. There are living amongst them, men and women pulling weapons from the chaos, moving bodies into piles, shouting to one another.

“It would seem we won,” she says, almost idly, but she knows he does not miss the relief that coats her words, almost makes them stick in her throat.

He doesn’t say anything in reply. Perhaps it is because neither of them expected to live through this, and so he has prepared no witty remarks for the outcome.

“Are you smiling, my Lady?”

His eyes are on her, trained on the lips she had not realised were stretched; it is a strange feeling, as if her mouth has forgotten quite how to distinguish between this and a grimace, and she realises that a laugh is bubbling up within her. As best she can Sansa swallows it back and shakes her head. “I’m just glad we’ll live to see another day.”

It’s a foolish thing to say, almost like one of those lies she’d trilled from her gilded cage so long ago; this woman of ice has no room for giddy proclamations, she who wears armour over her heart and speaks in tones of frosted winds.

Even so, he grins back. “Here’s to hoping tomorrow lasts.”

~*~

jon

They make a circle in the snow: mutilated bodies of Ironborn amidst shattered shards of ice, glistening like silver, clear as glass. 

There are so many of them that he almost misses Theon. Jon stares down at him and cannot quite piece together his unmoving corpse with the arrogant laughing boy from their childhood. What would Robb say? Are they together in some heaven or hell, throwing fists or crying?

Jon feels like crying, but he doesn’t. His body won’t work right. His muscles are stiff, like he is already dead, a statue in the crypts beneath Winterfell.

But these pale plumes of air that spring forth from his lips with every drawn breath speak of life, and the heart that beats like a drum, so loud armies could march to it, supports this claim. _Thump-thump_ , he hears; _left-right_ , he thinks. 

There in front of the weirwood tree with its twisted bone branches and blood-red leaves is Bran, whole and alive, staring at a raven that is perched above him. It squawks and with a pale eye takes flight.

Bran turns to him. “You lived.”

For a moment Jon cannot speak; his throat is hoarse, coated with blood, he is choking on the ash in the air.

“Aye,” he rasps. “As did you.”

“Only because of him,” his little brother says, jerking his chin toward Theon’s body, “and her.”

Jon frowns and looks around but there is no her to be found. There is only him and Bran and the remains around them, arrows stuck in dirt, and—

He bends down and scoops up the blade. The Valyrian steel ripples, bleeding blue and purple like a steel bruise. “Arya?”

He asks though he already knows the answer, he knows it in his bones. He thinks he’d known it from the moment Viserion had collapsed before him and the dead had fallen from the battlements like flies, their knees buckling and their screams fading into echos and then nothing.

“She killed him,” Bran says, and as outlandish as it sounds it is not a lie; Bran cannot lie, Jon knows this. He had once thought the same thing of Father (of Ned, his uncle, the warden of the north, they shared no name but they shared blood), but with Bran it is the truth.

Because he’s not Bran.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Bran replies, and of course the answer to the most important question, he doesn’t have.

Jon falters. A part of him has already ripped away but the half that is Father (Lyanna) leans down and presses his lips to his baby brother’s brow, a cold thing, but better than a real goodbye. “I will send someone to come and fetch you,” he says, for it horrifies him that Bran should stay in this consecrated graveyard for a moment longer than necessary. “Get warm for me?”

“I will,” Bran says, in that flat monotonous tone that a stranger would be better suited to use—not the boy who climbed before he could walk, who was quick to laugh and easy to love.

He leaves him, heart heavy, footsteps digging deep into the snow as if the weight of the world has been placed on his shoulders; one day he will sink right down and join his grandfather in the seventh hell, he is sure, and the Mad King will point and laugh and all around them the flames will be green.

Sam finds him first, covered in sweat and dirt, still shaking with his skin whiter than the snow around them. “J-Jon—”

“Sam,” Jon returns, shorter than he means to be with his oldest and dearest friend, who despite all of the odds survived and—

“Edd is dead.”

That stops him in his tracks and the fissures in his heart only grow deeper, are the Old Gods trying to pry it open to see what colour his blood runs; black or grey? How many blows to the stomach can he suffer before his skin is only an indigo stretch? Are the seven scars not enough? Is all that death not enough? Must there be more?

(but of course there is more, and more still yet to come, Edd is gone and there will be others, and he will break a little more with the weight of each loss)

“His body?”

Sam doesn’t expect the question. Jon doesn’t either, his grief has slowed everything down; he feels slow and stupid and lazy, and more tired than he ever has before. Even being dead hadn’t left him so exhausted.

“In the fields outside, I expect.”

Jon nods. “Have him brought inside. We’ll burn him and say the words together.”

(last one left alive burns our bodies)

“Jon—”

“Was there something else?”

Sam blinks. Then his face sets with a determination that is rare and when it is present, it means he is trying his very hardest to be brave; and after all, a man can only be brave if he is afraid.

“Are you alright?”

He wants to ignore the question, slap Sam on the shoulder and tell him to be on his way; find Gilly and Little Sam and get some rest.

Instead he starts laughing, just as he had when they had stood at the end of the world and looked out at the endless black together, and Sam had been afraid then too, and Jon told him it would not get any easier.

No, it had not gotten any easier, it had only gotten worse.

Sam starts laughing too, and so they are two fool boys (boys, they had been boys of summer once, green as grass, dreaming of being wizards and rangers), laughing with crinkled eyes as the clouds part to reveal a hesitant sun, pale yellow and unforgiving upon their skin.

“It’ll be alright, Jon,” Sam says when their mad relief dies away. “It will, I promise.”

Jon stares down at his feet and the speckles of blood that stain his boots. “I hope that’s a promise you can keep.”

~*~

arya

 

He’s dead.

It’s not the first time she’s told herself the words, two of them and cursed, like lead they drag her down as she sifts through bodies and broken shields and spears, her fingers touching ice cold skin.

It smells like death, it feels like death. He’d been right when he’d said it.

Still he is not among them but she does not let herself hope; that is for the long summer, for girls who laugh when they scrape their knees and only know the pain of being called names; hope is for Arya Underfoot, who had died the day the sword was brought down and the blood had spilled over the stones and the birds had flocked and flown against the pale blue sky.

She can’t find him amongst the living or the dead and that angers her, makes her skin burn. There is nothing else she can think of and that makes her afraid 

(fear is for the long night, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north; my sweet summer child, what do you know of fear?)

(it cuts deeper than swords)

—because this war isn’t over yet, though the Night King may have been felled by her hand there still prowls a lion in the south, and her list still has a name.

Even so, here at the end of all things, or the beginning of something else rather, the only thing she can think of is him. Fuck the dead, fuck the gods, she hadn’t wanted to spend her final hours with anyone but him and now, she can think of no one better with which to spend the rest of her days.

 _Stupid_ , she thinks, fists curling at her sides. It’s like one of Sansa’s stupid songs—the ones she sang in a high clear voice, the ones Arya would give anything to hear again. _He’s dead, anyways._

“Arya.”

It’s only been hours since she’s last seen him, but it feels like lifetimes, like the night had lasted twice as long as the life she’s lived thus far; hours ago he had said her name like a prayer, looked down at her like she was some pretty thing of blown glass he didn’t want to break, but his kisses had bruised her, sweeter than the ones she’d gotten in the time between then and now; he had touched her everywhere and his name, that had been hers, the last one she spoke before the horns had blown: a prayer of her own, a list for the taste of a new day, something to yearn for other than vengeance.

She turns around and there he is, not dead, not today. He is smeared with grime and covered in sweat and blood and she doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter, so long as his heart still beats and his eyes are still blue,

(not the blue of the dead, cold-like, hard as steel; Gendry’s eyes are storms, they crinkle at the corners when he laughs, they are winter skies and summer seas that sparkle, the cracks from his losses are fissures of lightning against the swirling tempest that rages within him)

and so she takes a step toward him.

“I didn’t think you would make it,” he whispers, for the words are just for them, cast out into the space between them, a spring breeze could steal them away.

There is a sarcastic remark on the tip of her tongue, so easily she could put on an aloof face and lace her hands behind her back and pretend that she is alright.

But she doesn’t. Instead she reaches for him, clutches at his jerkin with fingers stained red, if there is a storm inside of him there is one inside her too and it rages for him, and he might just be the moon if she is a wolf, she might just howl for him, he might just be the bright thing she’d fought for in the darkness of hell.

“I didn’t, either.”

How many times had they almost died? Rapers and thieves and goldcloaks, they had fought them off together, and in-between it all she had rolled onto her side, the roots digging into her back, studying his face as he slept. He’d once been the only thing she had, he’d been pack, he’d been family.

“Valar Morgulis.”

He is studying her face now, and she reminds herself to trace him tomorrow, to memorise what he looks like with her eyes closed. “What does that mean?”

“All men must die,” tells him, this time not begging with tears in her eyes but pleading silently still, her palm splayed over his heart, fuck the rules, fuck propriety, she deserves one good thing after saving the world, doesn’t she?

It doesn’t matter what his answer is, it won’t change the way she feels.

But his lip quirks up, that smile is disarming, it always was. She used to shove him so he didn’t see her cheeks flame, so bloody embarrassed to be the blushing maiden, the lady.

She doesn’t expect it when he kisses her forehead, lips chapped but warm against her skin. His fingers tangle with the ruin of her hair, and there is blood on her face, tacky and brown, but his lips ghost over her cut anyways.

“We didn’t.”

“No, but we will someday. You, and me. We’ll die, all men do. But first we’ll live.”

~*~

dany

 

Ruby red eyes stare down at her, piercingly, and Dany flinches as the wetness of a tongue strokes against her cheek, surprisingly gentle for a beast so fearsome; she should be screaming but she is only numb, kneeling in the muck with her arms still around that Old Bear, while a wolf licks her wounds.

He is nearly as tall as a horse with a coat as white as snow. She imagines that in the lands beyond the Wall he would be impossible to see from afar.

“My Queen?”

Her head snaps up at the sound of, at last, a familiar voice. Grey Worm is standing above her, his plate hastily wiped of remains. 

“Ser Jorah,” is all she can think to say, still holding him, her dearest friend, the only father she had ever had. 

Grey Worm lowers himself down and with an intimacy and care that surprises her, he slowly pulls her arms off of the knight. All of the dead had fallen and Ser Jorah had fallen with them, his last words tumbling ungracefully from bloody lips, I’m hurt.

“My Queen, he is gone.”

She knows that, she does. He has not moved for hours, his limbs are stiff and he has been growing colder and colder, but still she cannot quite wrap her head around it, this man who has always come back to her is finally gone for good.

Grey Worm helps her to her feet and two Unsullied she had not noticed before lift Ser Jorah’s body. They carry him back, and Dany cannot bring herself to glance over her shoulder,

(if I look back I am lost)

so instead she surveys the endless sprawl of dead, stacked over one another to form mountains. The sight is sickening but she makes herself look, for these are her people, northern or Dothraki or otherwise they had died fighting this war and they deserve as much at least.

It is a while before they walk through what remains of the southmost gate. Dany had not realised they had been so far from the castle, and their journey was only slowed by the soreness of her bones, the throbbing of her ankle. It had been hurt when she’d fallen from Drogon, but in all the chaos and under the fear, she had hardly noticed.

The courtyard has not yet been cleared. The dead are being sorted, funeral pyres are being constructed, and Dany wants to scream at them all to rest for a moment. But she does not, her voice will not work and there is a part of her that fears even now they won’t heed her commands.

The wolf is still beside her. Dany’s fingers are entangled in its silken frost fur, but she lets go as it moves to surge forward—

—toward Jon, who is standing with Lady Brienne and Ser Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer who had fought valiantly she is sure. Jon dismisses then both and kneels in front of the wolf, pressing his brow against its own and murmuring low words she cannot hear, even as she closes the distance.

Her footsteps crunch the snow. He looks up, and his eyes light upon her, and her lips part so that she might say something, anything. But before she can he is on his feet and pulling her against him, his hands warm against her frozen fingers, his body the most welcome comfort, the only home she has left to her name. He kisses her and it is as if winter recedes back into the darkness from which it is borne, as if this is the breath of summer, she can smell wildflowers and hear birds singing in the branches of a lemon tree, _he is alive._

They are alive.

There in the middle of his crumbling castle his lips move against her own, he pulls her close and cradles her head, he does not care who sees nor does she, they are alive, damn the rules, damn them all. With a languid ardency he kisses her and she doesn’t ever want it to end.

Just hours ago she had been furious with him, and for what? Having a better claim to the throne? He doesn’t want it. In this moment she doesn’t either, but one of them will have to step forward and claim the title and so she draws away.

Still she can’t help smiling, tears burning her eyes, and he notices. Of course he does, and as sweet as ever he wipes them away as they fall. 

“Dany,” he whispers, that and that alone, voice tinged with wonderment as he gazes down at her. Dany wants to hold him forever, to hide away for a thousand years; she wants to trace his scars, the old and new, and tell him that it doesn’t matter who they are or how hot their blood is, she loves him.

But then the wolf nudges his head between them and huffs. “I see you met Ghost,” Jon says, reaching down to ruffle his fur as if he is a domesticated hound rather than a beast so large he reaches her ribs.

“I did,” Dany says. “He came for me after the battle.”

There are questions he wants to ask her, she knows, but he holds them inside for now. They are both too tired to care, to do much beyond settling into the reality of their survival. What comes after these next heartbeats, she doesn’t know, and either way it doesn’t really matter.

“I am in need of a bath, I think,” she says, already picturing the steam curling off of searing waters, but of course they will be clouded with dirt and blood by the end of it, she is covered in so much of it. “Will you join me, Jon Snow?”

She wonders if, had they not almost died a thousand times over last night, he would wince at the name. Snow, for the bastardy that was never truly his. Worn like a cloak to shield him from the world, from the assassins she had run from as a child; _would Ned Stark have done the same for me, if my mother had died in that tower with Lyanna?_

“I will,” he says, “but I must find my siblings first.”

She nods, a black sort of envy coiling within her, wondering what it might be like to have a family with a love so consuming as theirs. He is her family, the blood of her blood, and her heart is his for the taking.

“Go,” she says to him. 

**Author's Note:**

> Y’ALL CAN YOU BELIEVE OUR ONE TRUE QUEEN, ARYA STARK, ACTUALLY KILLED THE NIGHT KING? Not to suck her dick but like i’d absolutely bend my knee to her. I want her to have All The Happiness after she literally saved ALL OF HUMANITY. 
> 
> Anyway, I wanted to write a little introspective piece before the next episode. Let me know if you liked it!
> 
> xoxo


End file.
